The Music They Made

Pioneer of a Beat Is Still Riffing for His Due

Published: February 16, 2003

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Mr. Berry achieved enduring success partly because adolescent white audiences found his buoyant, somewhat naughty enthusiasm as appealing as black teenagers did. Similarly, Little Richard, in contrast to Mr. Diddley, went out of his way to appeal to white audiences. But even though his original lyrics to "Tutti-Frutti" were bluntly sexual, his silver-lamé suits, pancake makeup, thick eyeshadow and high, slick processed pompadour gave him a high-camp sexual ambiguity that rendered him unthreatening to white teenagers and parents.

Bo Diddley never quite conquered the racial divide. As George R. White, author of "Bo Diddley: Living Legend" wrote: "Diddley remained firmly rooted in the ghetto. Both his music and his image were too loud, too raunchy, too black ever to cross over." His records were frequently played on jukeboxes and at dances but far less on the radio. Television appearances were rare. There were no movie offers.

Mr. Diddley was often uncompromising. In his dressing room before a 1955 appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," on which he was set to sing "Bo Diddley," Mr. Diddley said that the show's producers asked him to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons," then a huge hit. Mr. Diddley claimed not to know it, so cue cards were quickly written. Mr. Diddley said he thought he was now to perform two songs, not one, and he began with "Bo Diddley." Later he drawled, "Man, maybe that was `Sixteen Tons' on those cards, but all I saw was `Bo Diddley.' " Sullivan was enraged, Mr. Diddley recalled.

"He says to me, `You're the first black boy' — that's a quote — `that ever double-crossed me,' " Mr. Diddley recalled. "I was ready to fight. I was a dude from the streets of Chicago, and him calling me a black boy was as bad as him saying `nigger.' They pulled me away from him because I was ready to fall on the dude." He said Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. "I was scared," Mr. Diddley acknowledged.

The final insult, he said, was that he was told to return his $750 fee for the show.

In fact, Mr. Diddley's next television appearance was seven years later on "The Clay Cole Show" on WPIX-TV in New York. He didn't appear again on a network show for a decade, until he performed on "Shindig" on ABC in 1965.

Mr. Diddley was named Otha Ellas Bates at birth on Dec. 30, 1928, in McComb in southwestern Mississippi, a violent civil rights battleground in the 1950's and 60's. His mother, Ethel Wilson, was 15 or 16; he never knew his father, Eugene Bates. His family were sharecroppers; he was raised by his mother's first cousin, Gussie McDaniel. "In fact, Momma Gussie raised my Momma," he said.

The death of Mrs. McDaniel's husband, Robert, in 1934 and the harshness of the Depression-era rural South led the family to Chicago, where they had relatives.

In Chicago, destination for so many other Southern blacks, the family changed the boy's name to Ellas Bates McDaniel. Mr. Diddley said he thought Chicago schools wouldn't accept him unless Mrs. McDaniel was seen as his legal guardian.

Ellas soon showed an an aptitude for music. At 8 he saw a boy playing violin and asked Mrs. McDaniel to buy one. The family was on relief. So their church, the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church on the South Side, began a collection, bought him a violin and paid for lessons — 50 cents each — by a classical teacher, O. W. Frederick. Bo played classical music until he was 15, when he broke a finger. (He can no longer play the violin because his fingers are too thick, the result in part of a short teenage career as an amateur boxer.)

But more important, the music of the South Side was the blues, thanks to Muddy Waters and many others who had also moved to Chicago from Mississippi.

His First Guitar

Mr. Diddley began playing the drums but yearned to play guitar and sing like his idol, the Mississippi-born John Lee Hooker. Mr. Diddley's stepsister, Lucille, gave him a guitar for Christmas in 1940, when he was about to turn 12.

Bo taught himself to play, experimenting and duplicating the sound of his bow on the violin by rapidly flicking his pick across the guitar strings. (He also played trombone and the drums in the church band.)

He did not treat the guitar gently. "I couldn't play like everyone else," he said. "Guitarists have skinny fingers. I didn't. Look at these. I got meat hooks. Size 12 glove." He came to approach the guitar as if it were a drum set, thrusting the music forward. "I play drum licks on the guitar," he said. The result was an unusual sound — later played on his hand-built, exotically shaped guitars — that evolved into a distinctive backbeat, described by music historians as the meter of "shave-and-a-haircut, two bits." In the background he added maracas, which he built from toilet-tank floats, giving the music a Latin texture, and he gave more rhythm to the drum beat. The lyrics were often delivered staccato, adding to the pounding rhythm.

The Bo Diddley beat can be traced to West Africa via Cuba. It is also firmly rooted in African-American culture. In rural Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, slaves were denied access to traditional drums because slaveholders feared they could be used for communication. So they patted out rhythm on their bodies. This became "Hambone," an African-American musical tradition of stomping and slapping once used by shoeshine men and still affecting tap dance, cheerleading and a host of other disparate pursuits. At the same time, the guitar beat in the rural fields of the South was a common rhythm played by children on homemade single-string instruments rooted in Africa called diddley bows.